The Foot Fist Way

Humour is a personal thing, and you can't help feeling Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, instrumental in getting this film distributed, should have kept their Foot Fist chuckles private.

An odd Nacho Libre / Taxi Driver hybrid, this low-budget quickie (shot in 19 days) is unlikely to enjoy the crossover success of Napoleon Dynamite or Ferrell and McKay's Anchorman, with key gags misfiring and McBride underserved by a character too creepy to provoke many guffaws. 

Rather than working on its jokes, The Foot Fist Way (a literal translation of Tae Kwon Do) trades in misfit characters for its titters, with director Hill co-starring as an intense Foot Fist master, and co-star and co-writer Best scoring the film's few smiles as the loathsome no-budget action hero "The Truck".

But, even easy laughs prove hard to find (who'd have guessed adults bullying kids woud stop being funny) and a nasty undercurrent of misogyny (especially Simmons climactic condemnation of his foul-mouthed wife) is just unhelpful.

Well staged Tae Kwon Do offers welcome distraction (Hill and the young Moreno bust impressive moves), Simmons climactic demo-off with "The Truck" packs cool board breakage, and star and third co-writer McBride's indie charisma was enough to land him roles in Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder.  

This could have been The Karate Kid done as The Office, but in the end drops to its knees as The Flat-Foot Ham-Fisted Way.

Rob Daniel